A couple of years ago somebody sent me a link to a tweet. It said: “Moderating comments at the Guardian must be the worst job in the world.” Anyone who has spent enough time “below the line” of articles on the Guardian’s website will understand the sentiment – you will find rants, bile, insults and plenty of trolling.

You will also find genuine insight and brilliant jokes but, somehow, that is not what people take away. They notice the dark stuff, the words that draw blood. Someone telling you that you are wrong is always going to make a bigger impression than someone who agrees with you. Someone telling you that you are both wrong and, to pick a random example, “an utter fuckwit” will have even more impact.

For five years, it was my job. “The worst job in the world,” apparently. I read millions of comments and blocked tens of thousands. As a moderator, you develop a thorough understanding of how online conversation works, how it can be wonderful and enriching and how, if handled badly, it can go very, very wrong.

Good moderation isn’t about setting or controlling an agenda; it is about not letting anyone’sagenda ruin the conversation. Not letting an article about hats get ruined by someone who hates fashion; stopping a heartfelt piece about feeding refugees in Calais being dominated by someone ranting about child abuse in Rotherham; and preventing one man with an axe to grind about the legalisation of cannabis wrecking a scientific conversation about cancer treatment.

There’s more to moderating than that, obviously – there is weeding out legally dicey statements, spam and inappropriate language, but that is straightforward by comparison. What is harder is understanding agendas and how they can wreck a conversation – how a comment dropped like a stone in a still pond can cause tiny ripples that change a thread.

“Trolling” takes many forms. Some of it is actually brilliant, and if we are going to stop people winding each other up on forums, we may as well scrap this whole internet thing now: snark has its place, whether it is to raise a smirk, puncture the pompous, or tear down preconceptions. It is cathartic, it is useful, and often it is just funny. Civility can only accomplish so much.

But there are limits. The anonymous free-for-all of the online world can be damaging. It is easy to misinterpret, to overplay your hand, or become desensitised to the real people behind the screen. You arrive to share ideas, but can end up shaming someone else’s. It is easy to hurt someone else’s feelings and surprisingly hard to step away, as any journalist reading criticism of their article will tell you.

Ultimately, the biggest problems in comment threads come down to “agenda trolls”: the people so convinced they are right that they ride into a conversation not to join it, but to rip it apart.

They are easy to spot: they are the users who will scream “LIAR!” when they mean, “I think you’re wrong”, the ones whose arguments never quite seem to match the comment they are addressing, who resort to insults and TALK IN CAPITALS. You can’t win against those people, because they never truly believe they have lost.

They are comment-thread poison – men’s rights activists who act as if articles about women’s issues are their gender’s single biggest problem, climate change deniers who will drag any conversation about energy policy into murky pseudo-science, and borderline racists for whom there is no issue that cannot be pinned on immigration (UK) or black people (US). It is often known as “whataboutery” and is a tactic designed to throw a conversation off course.

The Guardian wants to engage with readers, but how we do it needs to evolve

Read more

Agenda trolls rarely read an article to its conclusion, because the nuance is not important. To them, this is a battle for a worldview. Here is an example: in a discussion about the need for female voices in Hollywood, one reader commented that unarguable economic forces were behind the lack of women in the industry, stating that “women’s films” didn’t really make money, which is why “Bridesmaids wasn’t a commercial hit”. Bridesmaids grossed $288m (£203m) worldwide, and was nominated for two Oscars, two Baftas and two Golden Globes. A success by any measure. Our agenda troll (presumably male) apparently hadn’t seen the film and hadn’t paid attention to its success because he didn’t care about it. He didn’t know anyone else who had seen it either, so he assumed that nobody saw it. He took his perspective and used it to fill in the bits of the world he didn’t know, like a sloppy kid with a colouring book and a limited tin of crayons. Preventing these sorts of interventions from derailing a conversation is an important part of the moderator’s job.

Like bitey insects, agenda trolls are at their worst when they swarm. The worst experiences below the line always involve large-scale assaults, either through a natural convergence of like-minded people – a sort of murmuration of awfulness – or by organisation.

Some stories come with their own audience, naturally bringing their agenda with them. Gamergate, the aggressive online campaign against the existence of “social justice warriors” in the video games industry, is a good example. An article on Gamergate would attract organised groups of people with an agreed agenda who specificallycome to the Guardian website to disrupt the conversation and discredit the argument. Their agenda isn’t to discuss, but to ruin. There are thousands of other topics subject to this kind of trolling: climate change, the sex industry, the tobacco industry, legalising any and all drugs, criminalising alcohol or tobacco, even the Campaign for Real Bread.

Worse still are the state-sanctioned “propaganda trolls”, paid keyboard armies delivering government-approved messages. The North Koreans’ limited trolling is often given away by the continued use of the phrase “Great Leader”, but the Russian organisation is huge.

Last year the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, Shaun Walker, wrote an extensive piece about the Kremlin’s paid trolling operations based in St Petersburg, although the exposure did little to deter the practice. Most of the commenters on Russian foreign policy are not paid operatives, but the few who are cause real problems. Commercial and political organisations of all persuasions no doubt do something similar.

Such “astroturfing” – creating a false impression of grassroots opinions – is destructive. It leads to an environment where everyone distrusts everyone else, accusing anyone they disagree with of being a “paid shill”. The result? Every opinion is tainted and meaningful debate is shut down, which, after all, is the point.

As difficult as the organised trolling is to handle, it can be harder to manage when trolls congregate naturally and there is nothing fake about the grassroots opinions. That is what happened with the refugee crisis. In five years of moderating at the Guardian I have never seen an issue bring out as much heartlessness and provoke as many kneejerk, emotive and angry responses, and I have never found a story so hard to work on.

Meet some of the Guardian's best below-the-line commenters

Read more

Some commenters weren’t just offering opinions in the “It’s a shame, but we can’t afford to help them” or “Immigration needs control” vein. They were saying: “Let them drown”, “Serves them right”, and worse. According to these commenters, we were believing the sob stories, letting the menace in, participating in our own downfall. The trolling took on a tone of desperation: it was two incompatible agendas clashing, striking sparks that would start fires across the Guardian website. And because these hostile comments were set against articles that were compassionate in tone, they seemed sharper, darker, more horrible.

We moderators do our best to tackle these issues: there are strict “on topic” lines for controversial articles, we have blocked comments that don’t engage with the issue, and blocked commenters from the site entirely if they can’t stick to the rules. Clearly, it is not enough. The Guardian’s community has ballooned in the past few years as our global audience has grown. As we hit more than 100 million monthly users, comments have started to breach 70,000 a day. Has the conversation got worse? Sometimes, when the number of comments becomes unmanageable.

What has not changed is that the writers, the commenters, the readers writing in to the Dear Mariella or Sexual Healing advice columns are humans. Real people, doing their job, passing the time, or even asking for help. When comments are cruel, they are painful.

When something becomes personally hurtful, stressful or annoying, people back away from it in self defence. That is what is happening to comments. Many times you will hear authors and journalists repeating the mantra: “Don’t read the comments”, which, when you think about it, is awful. How are journalists supposed to learn from their readers? How are they supposed to know if they have made mistakes if they refuse to look at the feedback? It would be a great shame if the important messages journalists needto hear aren’t getting through because loudmouths with rancid agendas are drowning them out.

So what can be done? Human moderators are expensive, and no one has the money to keep employing more and more people. Technology can help up to a point, but it is hard to imagine a robot intelligent and sensitive enough to handle such debates.

The other option is to let commenting die; to turn it off and let the trolls wither on the vine, out of sight, out of mind. Many news sites have done just this, and some Guardian columnists have gone on record as saying it’s time, that we have lost the battle. I disagree. There is so much good to be found below the line, so much wit and silliness, so much glorious irreverence and so much knowledge.

No. The conversation has to become better. We need to change behaviours.

News sites such as the Guardian owe it to readers to get this right, because when it works, it really works. On the Guardian, thousands of people spend every day using the platform to discuss the day’s news and the vast majority of those discussions are worth having. Elsewhere on the site, micro-communities have blossomed around single issues: recipes, computer games or county cricket. My absolute favourite is the Quick Crossword community, whose brilliant gang formed from discussing crossword clues and ended up having real-life meet-ups and parties – and even their own theme song. We can’t throw that away. It’s what makes the web work.

I am not arguing against arguing. We should have debates, even extremely heated ones. Winding up the self-righteous is a British tradition, there should be room for it. The only way to fix this problem is for us all to take responsibility for it. That means embracing comments wholeheartedly, it means steeling ourselves for the bad stuff and ignoring it, while engaging with the good stuff. It means believing in our arguments but allowing them to be points of discussion, not rigid, fixed points. It means not letting the trolls win.

As an organisation, the Guardian has to take responsibility too – it has to explore how to best design the site so that it encourages constructive debate; it has to ensure the moderation is relevant and consistent; it has to make sure excellent points made by readers are read and addressed; and it has to treat commenters with respect. Years down the line, we are likely to lose this platform if, collectively, we don’t attempt to fix it.

So here’s to the ranters, here’s to the jokes and the knowledge and the fury, here’s to making it great again, because all things can work if we work at them, and use them … in moderation.

I worked as a moderator at the Guardian for five years. It’s not the “worst job in the world”. It’s the best one I’ve ever had.